A modest suggestion to make BGs less stressful

One of the worst parts of the BG season is the very end when everyone jockeys for the best Gladiator Circuit rewards. As a result, players can go on long losing streaks that ruin their position and make the entire BG season turn sour. It's the complete opposite of fun and makes BGs enormously stressful.

So here's my suggestion: give all players in Gladiator's Circuit the highest bracket they reach during the season. So if, for example, I end up on Quantum 1 when the season ends, but I reached Mysterium 2 a week earlier, I'd earn M2 rewards. That way players are incentivized to reach as high as they can for peak rewards, but they won't lose their minds seeing rewards slide away as they slide down the rankings the last few days (either because of legitimate losses or modders, which come out in full force at season end).

This may not work for the top 10 in Celestial I-IV, but an easy solution is to award rankings based on how long each player was at a given rank, with greater weight given to higher ranks for longer times. For example, if a player is Celestial II for 4 days, they'll earn that spot over another who was there for 2 days and slid down to Celestial V, even if the last day the first player slide down a few spots. For 99.99% of players, though, this isn't an issue and wouldn't affect the idea of "peak rewards," so I'm sure this could be adjusted a bit if needed without ruffling too many feathers.

Comments

Ourobøros

Here we go… 🤦🏻‍♂️

BitterSteel

It can be very easy to place high early on a season. For example, if you end up one of the first X people through VT, you could be in C5 when you’re more of a M3 player.

Hell, if you were first in you’d automatically be C1.

Your idea on how long a player is at a rank is a pretty complex idea too to implement and balance properly for not a whole lot of reward in my opinion.

I appreciate why you suggested this idea, as get caught up in the stress too, but it’s part of the competition, and economically, if like 10x the amount of players are getting C5 rewards because they all made it there at some point, then C5 rewards get devalued, and would need to be reduced. There are a lot of knock on effects to what you’ve suggested unfortunately

ahmynuts

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willrun4adonut

I say, if it's that's stressful, just play to GC and then take the whatever ranking you get doing the objectives once you're there.

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Rebark

One of the worst parts of the BG season is the very end when everyone jockeys for the best Gladiator Circuit rewards. As a result, players can go on long losing streaks that ruin their position and make the entire BG season turn sour. It's the complete opposite of fun and makes BGs enormously stressful.

So here's my suggestion: give all players in Gladiator's Circuit the highest bracket they reach during the season. So if, for example, I end up on Quantum 1 when the season ends, but I reached Mysterium 2 a week earlier, I'd earn M2 rewards. That way players are incentivized to reach as high as they can for peak rewards, but they won't lose their minds seeing rewards slide away as they slide down the rankings the last few days (either because of legitimate losses or modders, which come out in full force at season end).

This may not work for the top 10 in Celestial I-IV, but an easy solution is to award rankings based on how long each player was at a given rank, with greater weight given to higher ranks for longer times. For example, if a player is Celestial II for 4 days, they'll earn that spot over another who was there for 2 days and slid down to Celestial V, even if the last day the first player slide down a few spots. For 99.99% of players, though, this isn't an issue and wouldn't affect the idea of "peak rewards," so I'm sure this could be adjusted a bit if needed without ruffling too many feathers.

Being consistent is part of the competition.
I spent half the season on celestial 5 and I'm going to finish on celestial 6. In the end, the bigger accounts play for real and rise, it's natural to fall. I can get Celestial 5 if I keep playing but I don't think it's worth the effort, but that's the point. It's not fair that I get rewarded from Celestial 5 if I didn't finish there.
But here's a tip: If you reached Mysterium 2 once, you can reach it again. I lost three days at Quantum. Defeats happen. If you're losing or starting to lose, it's a sign that there's something you need to change in your deck or there's something about the meta that you're not understanding. Sometimes it's masteries, sometimes it's knowing about specific fights. I myself was having difficulties on Korg until I found out that Havok made it very easy. Just knowing about this fight I started winning several matches that I wouldn't have won if I hadn't known and I rose very quickly. Join groups with people who play BG and watch YouTube lives of those who play at a high level, it helps.

WinterFields

I say, if it's that's stressful, just play to GC and then take the whatever ranking you get doing the objectives once you're there.

Is that really the goal of the game mode? Play the minimum number and that's it?

The goal is to have fun; that's the whole point of a mobile game. If it stops being enjoyable for you, there's no problem in stopping

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Vegeta9001

That's like all these shooter games, that show your season best and your current rank, they get Top 500 or whatever by grinding it out in the first week, but they don't get those rewards if they don't stay there, just because you get into a high division because noone else is there doesn't mean you get those rewards once you start seeing competition.

mgj0630

The better alternative is just to accept it and avoid the stress altogether.

I personally made it into Mysterium briefly during the season, but I never considered thats where I would end. And that's not because I couldn't put in the effort to maintain it, but rather because I don't view it as being worth it to maintain that rank.

What you're asking for would effectively devalue the rewards of those higher ranks, cause folks would grind the hell out of GC to get to a high bracket, then completely stop playing once they were satisfied.

In addition to that, you also have the knock on effects where someone reaches GC late in the season, and has to wait 15 minutes to find a match, cause everyone else has stopped playing cause they're locked into their peak rewards.

Ultimately, and I'm not trying to be rude, it's just a bad idea for a variety of reasons.

Polygon

I actually agree with OP. BGs is an extremely stressful game mode , and factors like bad drafts, dropped inputs, going first, going against whale rosters, it makes it so that if you drop like 100-200 points, that it won’t be as easy to climb back up. I dropped from arcane down to gamma and it’s difficult to climb back up since i have 0 r5s/r2s and need to consecutively outperform against massive stacked accounts.

Before it wasnt as much of a big deal not scoring as high but now each progressive rank gives 1500 extra 7* shards.

Which btw is a hefty amount when you consider the fact that Kabam has yet to buff the solo ranked rewards(top 10k barely gives you only 1k 7* shards which is laughable)

SirGamesBond

C4 confirmed for me
Lessgo.

altavista

Competitions don't work like this.

NFL/NBA teams don't get additional benefit because they were first in their division for one of the months during the season. Everything is cumulative - the wins/losses all play a role in their total record. The last few weeks are the most stressful as teams jockey for positioning; it would be less exciting/meaningful if teams could just rest on their laurels because they had a win streak back in December.

The NBA is instituting a mid-season tournament, so theoretically Kabam could institute something similar where players get a little bonus reward for their rank after Week 2.

So, the model you are proposing would only work as an Addition, not as a Replacement for how GC is currently structured.

Ironman3000

Very ungood idea.

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Pikolu

Apparently everyone loves being stressed out.

Love the straw man, good luck getting constructive feedback after that comment. We all know that you're not willing to listen to what is being said, so I'm not going to try and reason or debate with you.

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Karatemike415

It's a competitive game mode.
It would completely defeat the purpose of the ranking ladder if you didn't finish where you ended up placing haha

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WinterFields

It's a competitive game mode.
It would completely defeat the purpose of the ranking ladder if you didn't finish where you ended up placing haha
It's another form of competition. Plenty of sports score the player for their "best" attempt out of a given set of tries. Pole vaulting, long jump, some archery modes all use this format, and that's only off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more. To say my suggestion isn't competition ignores all other types of competitions except the current BG form we have.

Except competitors don't get to change how the game is won because it's suits them best. Kabam set the rules and what constitutes as coming out on top, and we strive accordingly.

I don't disagree the current system can feel stressful at times. But the proposed solution won't fix it either. The GC tiers, except for Uru III, all have a limited number of openings. Changing those limited positions will reduce the value of the rewards.

If your highest score is what is used, there will still be stress to keep getting a higher score. Losses that lower your score will still be frustrating. Also other competitors will also be able to maintain their highest score, so if you don't continually improve yours, you are at risk of going down in tier. I just don't see how it would actually solve the problem

Pikolu

It's a competitive game mode.
It would completely defeat the purpose of the ranking ladder if you didn't finish where you ended up placing haha
It's another form of competition. Plenty of sports score the player for their "best" attempt out of a given set of tries. Pole vaulting, long jump, some archery modes all use this format, and that's only off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more. To say my suggestion isn't competition ignores all other types of competitions except the current BG form we have.

None of your examples have a ladder-based format for placement though. In competitions that have ladder-based format for reward structure don't award based on best effort unless there's some sort of seeding system that would start everyone in GC. Even then, that just leads to the problem Clash Royale has where you mega-inflate the amount of trophies in there over time. I don't even know if clash Royale awards you based on current placement or best placement you got.

AverageDesi

Usually I get your suggestions but this one is just awful .

DNA3000

It's a competitive game mode.
It would completely defeat the purpose of the ranking ladder if you didn't finish where you ended up placing haha
It's another form of competition. Plenty of sports score the player for their "best" attempt out of a given set of tries. Pole vaulting, long jump, some archery modes all use this format, and that's only off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more. To say my suggestion isn't competition ignores all other types of competitions except the current BG form we have.

That's not true. In those sports your score is measured in terms of best effort in the mechanics of the competition, but your placement during a competition is always judged based on your overall performance at the end, not at any time in the middle. That's a very critical distinction.

When we do a match, the points we score are absolute points. They are judged based on a very specific set of objective rules. Much like distance in the long jump or target score in archery, they are judged by criteria, not by comparison. But ELO rating is a comparative system. It is a relative score based on comparing competitors. We all start at zero, and then our rating changes based on wins and losses against our competitors. ELO starts off completely bogus. We all start at zero after all, regardless of how strong we are. But rating improves over time with more and more matches. Mathematically speaking, ELO converges on the true competitive strength of the players over time. ELO, and the placement order it implies, thus gets more accurate the longer the competition goes on. It is in principle the most accurate when the most matches have been played, at the end of the season. The final placement thus overrides any interim one.

Think about archery or the long jump. Competitors compete in order. Whoever goes first automatically gets first place regardless of performance. They drop to second place if the next competitor gets a higher score. But they could linger in the top ten even if they are the worst competitor. That's not really an issue, because interim rankings in the long jump or archery don't count for anything. The final ordering of the competitors is the only thing that matters.

We don't want the order or the timing of the competition to play an important role in the competition, so we only count the placement order of the competitors at the end, when all the matches have been played and our information about who is better than who is as good as it will ever be. If we were to count things like "how long a player is in the top 100" we are now weighing mathematically inaccurate information more than the final ordering, which is improper.

TyEdge

Competitions don't work like this.

NFL/NBA teams don't get additional benefit because they were first in their division for one of the months during the season. Everything is cumulative - the wins/losses all play a role in their total record. The last few weeks are the most stressful as teams jockey for positioning; it would be less exciting/meaningful if teams could just rest on their laurels because they had a win streak back in December.

The NBA is instituting a mid-season tournament, so theoretically Kabam could institute something similar where players get a little bonus reward for their rank after Week 2.

So, the model you are proposing would only work as an Addition, not as a Replacement for how GC is currently structured.

I would like some incremental rewards. The solo event is terrible. Here’s what I’d like to see:

1) a points bump for reaching gladiator circuit. Maybe a one-time 50k or something

2) a check-in at the 2-week or 3-week mark to ease the pain of a terrible week 4.

What makes this worse than war, for example, is that players are constantly being added to the GC pool as they reach it. This creates more openings for a significant drop, whereas war season points are locked in once earned. This is especially true at lower rankings, say sub 200 points.